"Oh, I don't know, I think I'd buy a gown of souls." NiNi picked at her fingernails, but Purity discerned a hint of bored malice through her thin lips.

"And that's the difference between us, NiNi." NoNo rounded on her sister, instantly and finally feral. "Everyone thinks us the same, when they couldn't be more wrong. Because you'd buy the d.a.m.ned gown, and I'd be the one selling it to you. And when you were starving because you spent all your dirties, you'd have nothing but a gauze of souls to keep you warm, dry, and fed-you appallingly helpless mannequin."

The room sat in stunned silence. n.o.body had ever heard NoNo talk for so long, let alone display more than the barest minimum of a personality.

"There's a difference between you two? That's the first I've heard of it!" Bitzy laughed, but her voice pitched uncomfortably high. Purity did not think she noticed the look that earned her from NoNo. "Girls, what would your mother say if she heard her daughters barking at each other like mad dogs? Nothing flattering, I can tell you that much. Now please, will everybody just-"

"Don't you ever talk about my mother, Bitzy Bratislaus. Or I swear, I'll . . ."

"You'll what?" NiNi interjected. "Tattle?"

NoNo stared down her sister. "I find it hard to feel insulted by the afterbirth. Don't you have more candy to eat?"

NiNi blinked back a bland expression. "I'm afraid you're a bit of a c.u.n.t, NoNo."

"I will Kill you myself." NoNo was losing control. "Mner told me, if you sing slowly enough, you can make it hurt. I'll grate you like a brick of cheese, sister." She realized what she'd said and sat back, scowling.

Mner Bratislaus? Purity tried to follow. Sing?

NiNi appeared not to be paying her twin full attention. "Mmm, capital, et cetera. Purity's been losing weight, don't you think?"

Bitzy Bratislaus threw her cup and saucer on the table with a clatter. Her nerves seemed finally to have yielded to circ.u.mstances. But rather than shout about her late, faithless father she quavered, "Am I the only one who needs more f.u.c.king tea?"

The young ladies were growing jumpier by the minute-NoNo had clutched her sunshade reflexively when Bitzy'd startled them by dropping her china. Now she was rubbing it up and down in a most indelicate-no, Purity realized with a finger of ice up her spine, she's unsheathing it, just an inch or two, unconsciously. NoNo's got a sword hidden up her parasol. Indeed, an inch or two of quicksilver blade was visible beneath the lacey baton handle of the sunshade.

Cane dancing lessons. Purity felt ill.

Bitzy sniffed and wrung her hands once or twice, then looked up with a darling smile. "This is a tea party, after all."

"Yes," said NoNo and Purity together, staring at each other with an air of delayed recognition.

Without breaking eye contact, Purity pulled on the bell and heard the clinking of teaspoons from behind the door. "You are so right, Bitz," she continued, wondering how to escape before anyone else got Murdered and with dawning bewilderment at the prime suspect. "It is absolutely a tea party."

It took another hour before Purity could escape. Thirty minutes of tea and then thirty more spent pretending not to notice Bitzy crying into her napkin. An hour of horrified silence.

At last Purity excused herself for a costume change, as one did, but ran away from Bitzy's apartments instead, nipping into a dressing room, which railroaded into an antechamber, and thence into a foyer where, finally, an archway led to the main corridor outside the apartments. Bitzy's suite hugged the outmost gla.s.s wall of the Dome, and as Purity made her escape she'd felt followed by the great orange eye staring through the slightly curving gla.s.s. Closing the foyer door behind her had been a relief, but she wouldn't feel safe until she'd put as much distance between herself and NoNo Leibowitz as possible, and then finished what she'd begun the day before. She should have listened to her stomach and not some handsome brick wall of a boy with walnut skin and a soft beard-Purity ran fast for the Dawn Stains.

Mner Bratislaus gave NoNo the Weapon, before she Killed him. Purity's thoughts were racing faster than her white-ruffled ankles. She's the Killer and the butcher from the aviary. Oh my.

Even newly revealed as clever, NoNo wouldn't have figured it out on her own; she'd learned about the Weapon from the Lord Senator of the Circle Unsung. Bells, was that a breach of security protocol! What did NoNo have between her legs to convince Mner Bratislaus to break his oaths? Where and how would the Circle be able to keep such a tool a secret? Purity couldn't guess at the how, but her gut told her that the Weapon was there, in the Dawn Stains, she just knew it- it might be an absurd thing for her gut to say, but absurdities were all she'd been given.

She took the quickest route-out the gates of Maidens' Keep and along the cloistered garden paths that connected the Keep to the Pet.i.te Malaison. Purity ran up the stairs of the Malaison, heading for a pair of doors off a fifth floor corridor, wondering how she'd gain entry without a praetor's helm. But Purity found the doors wide open, and she dashed inside without a thought to why that might be, skidding down the still-open hatch and almost falling on her face at the feet of the Dawn Stains.

White light. A spray of colors. A sense of age that stilled her racing thoughts and felt like winter.

"Bells, but they should have installed a better lock!" Purity whispered to herself as she turned around slowly, a little girl playing in the snow, feeling the weight of the pure light on her lashes.

"They did, la.s.s." Purity opened her eyes to a sneering stick-figure in canary tulle standing on the spiral stairs. A body huddled at NoNo's feet on the stairs, and with a nasty kick she sent it tumbling to the floor below. Kaien, bleeding steadily from a wound in his side, raised his head and waved weakly at Purity.

"Look who I found skulking near the secret treasure cove," NoNo leered, twirling a silver blade thinner than a ribbon. Sure enough, Purity recognized the lacey grip as the handle of NoNo's sunshade. "It's your pet peasant."

NoNo descended the last few stairs and planted her boot on Kaien's lower back.

"I know everything!" Purity exclaimed, the lie coming to her lips in the instant she saw Kaien. How could she have suspected him to be the Killer? He was so . . . good.

"Cor, how's that?" NoNo sneered in some kind of accent.

"You needed to practice using the Weapon." Purity held her hands up, palms forward, thinking as fast as she could. "Just like your dancing instructions-those were cane dancing lessons, weren't they, NoNo? The cane sword, unless I'm mistaken? And you are so good at doing the same thing over and over and over, aren't you? That's how you excel. It's the only way you can excel."

NoNo twisted her boot heel into the small of Kaien's back, eliciting a cry of pain.

"You only followed one stableboy." Purity made it sound acceptable, to end the life of one helpless boy. "Just the one. You didn't expect a whole scullery of naked lads, let alone a pair of Tsengs! How could Tsengs find the bas.e.m.e.nt? Ha!" Purity had to admit, she was perhaps not bound for the stage or the podium, but NoNo didn't seem to notice her bad acting.

NoNo narrowed her eyes. "And how did ye ken so much about my sorties, then?"

Why is she talking funny?

"Well, I must say, you didn't do a terribly thorough job of covering your tracks, NoNo. The ma.s.sacre in the aviary? A team of dead tailors and seamstresses, canary yellow thread in their hands, the little boy whose dying words were your laundry instructions: 'darn her.' That's how innocent your victims were, blademistress." Purity felt her temper rise.

"And you just volunteered the information that you'd been Mner Bratislaus' mistress before he Died. Before you Killed him. Really, NoNo, it's not like you've striven for secrecy-I won't be the only one to figure it out."

"Aye." NoNo hung her head. "Now I'm just rolling with the yaw."

"I-I'm not sure what that means, exactly, NoNo, but I can help you."

"My papa liked books about the sea, before he left." NoNo looked up at Purity with a sad, sweet face. Then her expression melted into a sneer. "Lucky for me, they put loads about war in sea books."

NoNo bent down and grabbed Kaien by the scruff of his shirt. He raised his head and grimaced. "Like how a hostage is useless unless the scurvy dogs you fight know that you're willing to spill blood."

She slid the atom-thin blade against his throat with no pressure at all; the mere presence of the weapon flensed away his skin like parting curtains. The brown flesh of Kaien's neck parted like pudding to expose a carotid artery, red and racing.

11.

That the deaths we die are finite is acknowledged as truth. Canon also holds that the worlds themselves are finite and, more tellingly, ordered according to the pattern of primacy: we spiral outward as we live, die, and live again. We are born unknowing, die our first deaths unknowing, and enjoin the chaos of the metaverse at the pace of our soul's own choosing. Even our bodies, reborn as they are from life to life, are reflections of our spirit. What then of that distant doorway, a thousand deaths hence, through which only the wisest or most dire may cross?

-Bede the Formerly Venerable, De Plurimundi Anathanata Cooper, Sesstri, and Nixon landed in a pile, cursing at one another. They pushed themselves apart and sat, blinking, at the sight before them. A lake of black liquid rippled in spare torchlight and-was it a cavern? A cavern ceiling arched overhead. Cooper couldn't say how he knew it, but they were deep underground. The cavern was round and wide, and they'd been brought to a wedge of rock that jutted out into the black lake. Overhead, the ceiling was pierced by a sharp stalact.i.te that looked more like corroded iron than mineral. The same oily substance that filled the lake dripped down its blade, sending ripples across the otherwise placid surface at regular intervals.

"What the genuine f.u.c.k?" Cooper asked.

A sucking sound came from the wall behind them, where a plug of amber resin was melting away, revealing a dark pa.s.sage beyond. It was a kind of door, he understood, when a slight woman with clouds of bright red hair breezed through.

"Alouette!" Sesstri roared.

"The blood of the world-beast parts for our feet, Omphale. Know that you are welcomed into the Grotto of White Tears," the redhead intoned, standing barefoot in a too-tight purple c.o.c.ktail dress that barely covered her nipples. Then she smiled crookedly. "The Winnowed asked me to say that. h.e.l.lo, duckies!" She wiggled her fingers in a wave.

Sesstri and Cooper helped each other to their feet, but Nixon ran to Alouette's side. "Where's the house? I was gonna take another nap." He tugged on her hem. She patted his head and looked to Cooper with a sympathetic eye.

"Oh, you thing!" Alouette peered at his back. "I mean, 'Oh, you poor thing!' What did they do to you? Well of course they did what they do, but still, why did they do it so thoroughly?"

"Where's Asher?" Sesstri asked.

"Your lover has other business, don't you worry about that. We must take care of you two."

Sesstri growled, deep in the back of her throat. "Don't tell me what to worry about,ent.i.ty, and if you must fuss over someone, fuss over Cooper- I'm fine."

Alouette shook her head and combed her fingers through her tangled red hair. "Oh, Pinky, if only that was true!"

Sesstri steamed. "Ridiculous G.o.ddess- a.n.a.log pretending to be a ridiculous woman!"

"You know, that reminds me of something." Alouette looked up and began rambling. "My friend, Rabelais, who had stopped pretending to believe in Christ and started pretending to believe in Democracy, said, 'Fay ce que voudras.' And St. Augustine, who was never a friend of mine, said, 'Love and do what you will.' Then again, Rabelais has always been a liar and n.o.body's seen Augustine since the Vandals first killed him, the Berber b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 'Reason, will, and pa.s.sion' my tight Georgia peach! Is that crazy? It sounds crazy." Alouette's pretty lips twitched.

"Yes," Cooper said. "That sounds crazy. What does it mean?"

"And what in the worlds does it have to do with you being one of the First People?" Sesstri asked.

"I forget." Alouette shrugged. "But it shut you up for a hot minute, dinnit?"

"Who are you?" Cooper asked her.

She gave him an arch look that, he realized, belonged to his dreambeluga. Then she waved at the giant metal spike in the center of the cavern, and at the black lake below. "This is the most sacred place of the Winnowed, you know. Their Grotto of White Tears. I used to come here when I was sad."

"White Tears?" Sesstri wrinkled her nose at the black pool.

"You see our problem."

Sesstri nodded. Cooper looked out across the dark surface and groaned. His back hurt. So bad.

"Oh, poor mincemeat Cooper! I have a few things for you." Alouette revealed a plate from behind her back, and removed a metal room- service lid. She bent at the waist and handed Cooper a sandwich. That smell.

"How did you know?" He picked up two slabs of toast filled with purple jelly and thick, juicy sausage patties, bit off as much as was practical, and promptly began to cry.

"What's wrong with his eyes?" Nixon asked. "And where's my sammich?"

Cooper sniffed and answered, though he kept crying. "This was my grandmother's secret afternoon snack. She'd give me sandwiches with fried sausage and jelly. How did you know?"

"Oh honey," Alouette said, patting his head. "Of all the questions you could ask . . . lost comforts . . . That's the kind of thing I just know." She moved behind him and crouched to get a look at his back, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her mouth to one side.

If Cooper heard any of this he gave no sign, lost in the past. "She lived in Arkansas and I would go there three or four times a year, or she and Grandpa would drive up, and my mother always counted calories, but Grandma would fry me pancakes in sausage grease till they had a ring of crispy crispiness around the edges, and after her soap operas we'd eat the leftover sausage with grape jelly and white bread. My friends all thought it was gross."

He looked up, still crying- but softly. "I missed her so much when she died."

While Cooper talked, caught in some reverie that wasn't entirely the result of fried pork sausage and half-burnt bread, Alouette worked on his injuries. She held her fingers away from the wound but pinched and scrubbed the air; she removed the dirt and grit that had been ground into his open wound, just pulled it off like a gauze of smoke or cobweb. From behind her back, again, she pulled a small brown grease pot; its contents smelled like grease, too, but also camphor and turmeric.

Cooper kept on. "I know that's a weird thing to say here in the Special Spooky Cave, but I remember her so strongly right this minute, I think I'll lose her again if I don't say it out loud. She had a stern face and a bottomless soft spot for her grandsons, and she had these great big knuckles. I would lie on the couch and put my head in her lap while we watched As The World Turns and she would rub my temples with her witch hands. In a movie they might have been scary, but in her duplex with Grandpa in his chair wearing his old one-piece speed suit and that b.i.t.c.h from the soap, Lucinda, being horrible on the TV, my grandma's hands on my forehead were heaven. I'd forget all the little troubles that seem so big when you're young, the kids at school or the mean teacher, or the girls-boys- and all that stuff."

Alouette applied the grease gently-where it touched Cooper's back, the open wounds dried up and stopped seeping, the ominous redness of impending infection receded, and his back turned from a fresh nightmare into an old one, some safely bygone horror. His scars were deep, and he was missing most of the original skin and subcutaneous fat, but the healed flesh was pink and unbroken. Cooper didn't even notice.

"But I can't imagine my grandma as anyone but my grandma, old and smart-mouthed and judgmental of anybody who didn't belong to her. I guess I thought she was gone, just gone, or wherever the universe puts fussy, adoring old ladies who believe in a heaven that's far too one- dimensional to actually exist."

"You're sweet." Alouette leaned in and whispered, "That's what good grandsons are supposed to think, Cooper."

He shrugged and noticed the stiffness was gone. So, too, was the pain that had swamped him since the aesr's absence.

"Yeah, but it's stupid. My grandma's not gone, and the universe didn't put her anywhere. It kicked her out into some other universe, and now she's got another life, doesn't she?"

"Of course she does." Alouette tucked away the grease pot behind her prolific back. She wiped her hands on Cooper's arms and smiled at a job well done. Then she pulled a plaid work shirt from behind her and draped it over Cooper's shoulder.

"But that's awful!" he continued.

Alouette spun Cooper around-it didn't hurt-and fixed him with a look he recognized entirely too well. "Are you saying that because you loved your grandma, she doesn't deserve to live?"

"Well, no, of course not! But she should, she ought to . . . she should still be my grandma, that's all." He slipped on the shirt, tenderly, surprised at the lack of pain.

Alouette raised a corner of her mouth. "Then you're a lucky ducky, because she is. She's also young, healthy, and not dying slowly of congestive heart failure. She can breathe and run and fry sausages, Cooper. She's not tethered to an oxygen tank. She can remember you, just like you can remember her. Is simply surviving the people you love so much better?"

"Of course not." Cooper stood and fastened the b.u.t.tons of his new shirt. "It's just such a weird reality to wake up to. You're used to-well, I'm used to, you know, people die, you put them in a box, and that's it. There's something about that box that's safe, permanent, and not totallyfreaking-insane. To find out the truth, that the body in the box-the memory in the box-is just sloughed-off skin, and the real person is out there somewhere you can never go in your lifetime . . . it makes me feel sad and acrophobic, to say the least."

"Agoraphobia is the right thing to feel, I think. The worlds are vast, and sadness happens. Do you like your shirt?" Alouette straightened it for him.

"I like what it must cover up," Cooper said, marveling at the lack of pain or stiffness.

She rested her head against his shoulder. "It's not that bad. I've seen worse."

"Well, I sure as h.e.l.l haven't," said Nixon. "The spooks got you good!"

Sesstri looked like her face was wrestling with her mouth. "Thank. You. For helping Cooper," she stuttered, turning red. "You've probably saved his life."

Alouette nodded. "It was almost exactly the least I could do." The resinous door opened again with a sucking sound, and three men entered, all dressed in plain brown clothes.

"May I introduce some of my Winnowed friends: Osman Spare, Bede, and Sid." The three men bowed to her deeply, then inclined their heads toward the newcomers. "I wanted you to be here for this." Alouette looked almost apologetic.

The youngest of the three, Osman Spare, a handsome youth with gold curls and one bronze nipple showing from his toga, raised his hand to speak. "A few months ago you would have thought this a pool of unspoiled cream."

"So white it lit the cavern," said the little brown one called Sid, before popping a hemp seed into his mouth.

Osman crouched by the edge of the black fluid, tense and coiled. "The Lash- that iron vein overhead- has been dripping darkened ichors for years, but the purity of the pool masked the taint until the last few weeks. I believe the dark fluid settled at the bottom until the waters grew disturbed and the two strata mixed, appearing to foul the pool overnight. But the People of the Foundation have revealed our weaknesses again, for we saw the signs of corruption and turned our heads. Even martyrs need lessons."

Sesstri had mentioned that the Winnowed were a tribe of saints and martyrs, deposed tyrants and philosopher-kings. Great personages of many stripes, upon whose lives and deaths were founded religions, cultures, and entire histories. If the Winnowed were former paragons, how did they agree upon a single ideology? That sounds like a Sesstri question, Cooper thought, looking back to the metal tip piercing the ceiling of the cavern.

"You call that jigger the Lash, you say?"